Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language
EARLY CHRISTIAN LATIN AS A LITURGICAL LANGUAGE 129 particular complained about the poverty of philosophical vocabulary in Latin.9 Hence, Christian Latin is distinguished from Christian Greek in the first place by its great number of loanwords. These are inherited from the early, Greek period of Western Christianity; they either came into Latin from Hebrew through Greek, such as alleluia, osanna, amen, mammona, ephpheta; or they are directly taken from Greek, such as apostolus, episcopus, baptisma. The many neologisms in Christian Latin are a powerful testimony to the early Church's awareness of the newness and otherness of God's revelation in Christ. The development of Christian Latin was decisively shaped by the early Bible translations. As Christianity spread in the Western part of the Roman Empire, it became necessary to translate the Holy Scriptures for those who were not able to understand the Greek of the Septuagint or of the New Testament. The earliest Latin Bible versions were ad hoc translations for the use of individual Christian communities and are usually referred by their collective name Vetus Latina. It was only towards the end of the fourth century that St Jerome produced a common version of the Bible, the Vulgate, at the request of Pope St Damasus. The language of the Vetus Latina translations was of mixed quality, as St Augustine observed na De doctrina Christiana: 'in the early days of the faith', he laments, 'any person who got hold of a Greek manuscript and fancied that he had some ability in the two languages went ahead and translated it'.10 The Old Latin translations followed the Greek text scrupulously, even to the point of forcing its Greek and, in the case of the Septuagint, Hebrew idiom on the Latin language. Hence, they are full of grammatical solecisms and idiosyncrasies. Whatever the quality of these early Latin Bible versions was from the classical point of view, they were extremely important for the formation of Christian Latin. 9 Cicero, De finibus 1; see T. Fögen, Patrii sermonis egestas. Einstellungen lateinischer Autoren zu ihrer Muttersprache (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 150), München-Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2000. 10 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 11,36 (ix, 16): ed. and trans. R. P.H. Green, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 73.
